Billy's Trip to the Power Plant

[William]

The shots are not too good because I had to be quick with just a point and shoot in order to avoid questions, security was tight.

Some cooling towers:

http://www.zen64507.zen.co.uk/Towers.JPG

Bottom of a cooling tower:

http://www.zen64507.zen.co.uk/coolingbase1.JPG

Bit closer:

http://www.zen64507.zen.co.uk/water1.JPG

Some pipage:

http://www.zen64507.zen.co.uk/fgd2.JPG

Some pipage with a big 600ft chimney (which is ****ing scary to be at the top of; anyone who says that they are not scared of hights should go up on this with a harness and come down terrified):

http://www.zen64507.zen.co.uk/stack2.JPG

Stack from a bit of distance on a different day:

http://www.zen64507.zen.co.uk/stack1.JPG

This is an interesting one, the area circled in red is an ash pile from all the ash from the plant, it is about 10 miles away and the surrounding land is perfectly flat, so you get an idea how bleeding big this hill is.

http://www.zen64507.zen.co.uk/ashhill.JPG

[Fayshun]

Very neat, I love cooling towers and I'd love even more to stand inside one when it's 'raining' inside.

Scary story alert, when I was at uni we had a guest lecturer in talking to us about product design and he mentioned one cooling tower they'd been doing some testing on. Apparently there was this black sludge 'growing' in the bottom of one of the cooling towers and it was hella toxic. After a little investigation, they discovered that a really hardy bacteria was living in it and basically the whole base of the tower was acting like a giant ion-exchange system and concentrating all the pollutants fron the power station.

Sad story alert, they've just been given the go-ahead to fill the last of Radley lakes next to our workplace with waste ash from Didcot power station. No more dragonflies then. :(

[Dr. Z]

With a bit more post processing work you could lose the vignetting?! on the shot of the water droplets at the bottom of the tower and really bring out that rainbow!

Is that vignetting because you took the shot at a berserk angle and cropped/straightened it and lost the corners?

[William]

Hmm oh no, its a crap camera but I also had to take the photo very quickly sort of under my armpit on the sly as security is very tight there so I guess my shirt is what the black bits are in the corners. It just avoided people asking questions. The lens on it is not spectacular either. I didn't know the rainbow was there when I took the shot.


I'm not very good with Photoshop but I will see what I can do with it.

http://www.zen64507.zen.co.uk/chopped.jpg


That is about as best as I can do.